‘You
can’t go home again’: A one-time Denver local
confronts a gentrifying city

January
28, 2019

A
hunt for old haunts in a gentrifying Denver

I used to
think my neighborhood of Five Points in Denver was unique.
Of course, years after I left the Five Points I grew up
in, I discovered that not only were there many other
neighborhoods across the U.S. called Five Points, but
there were also thousands of communities that were like
mine in more than name.

My Five
Points was a small, mostly black and Latino neighborhood
in northeast Denver. My Five Points had cracked red-clay
sidewalks and empty lots where we’d hold block parties.

In my Five
Points, we didn’t have fancy restaurants, farmers
markets or even chain grocery stores. But we had a little
shop on the corner whose real name nobody could tell you,
but where the owner knew every kid on the block, and cast
a knowing eye when we came in for push-pops and Limon
packets.

In my Five
Points, some matriarch or disgruntled uncle would always
be sitting on a porch, ready to yell troublesome kids back
to their homes if they got too out of hand. In the summer,
kids perked up not at the jingle of an ice cream truck,
but the clanging bells of the paleta or elote cart making
its way slowly down the sidewalk.

There was
gang violence, drugs and poverty, but there were also
local community organizations and leaders stepping in to
help when the city would not.

It turns
out the story of my Five Points is the story of
communities all over the U.S., many enduring similar
fates, as the forces of gentrification and boom-and-bust
economic cycles push and price people — especially the
poor and communities of color — out of their homes,
increase housing prices and homeless populations, and
bring in edgy new condos, pop-up shops, boutique barber
shops and CrossFit studios in neighborhoods previously
made up mostly of liquor stores and laundromats.

As Thomas
Wolfe’s novel-turned-adage says, you can’t go home
again. It’s supposed to mean that things change while
you’re away and warns against nostalgia for the homes of
our childhoods.

These days,
one could add another adage: You can’t stay home,
either.

Visiting
Denver decades after I first left, I barely recognized my
neighborhood.

Where the
borders of Five Points were once indicated by a sudden
shift in demographics and an increase in old homes and
housing projects, pretty signs now proudly announce the
“Five Points Historic Cultural District.”

New
residents tend to be white and higher-income, new
construction abounds, and it’s hard not to see the
correlation between the two.

As I walked
past the old housing projects now boarded up and bearing a
sign for an excavation and demolition company, it wasn’t
nostalgia but frustration that crept in.

I
remembered walking past those projects when they were
vibrant with life and people who looked like me, even as
the property itself showed signs of wear and neglect.
Where were those people now?

This seemed
to me like a reminder that those investing in the
neighborhood now did not see something worth investing in
when this neighborhood was mostly home to people of color.

As I passed
an old duplex, I saw a young black kid taking the screen
off the front window of one of the units and holding the
window open while a younger kid climbed in. The older kid
looked around nervously at the white people driving and
walking by. I smiled, remembering how my brother and I
used to climb into the windows of our own house when
we’d left or lost our keys and no one was home to let us
in.

In the Five
Points of the time, we would have done this loudly and
laughing, knowing that anyone on the block who saw us knew
it was our house. But these kids were growing up among
strangers, newcomers who might call the cops on two black
kids climbing into a window. It’s what has been
happening all over the country as communities of color go
from communities where everybody knows your name to just a
place where people live. It’s what longtime Seattle
residents lament is happening in places such as the
Central District and Capitol Hill.

But some of
the old Five Points still remains. On Welton Street,
there’s an old barber shop, Afro Styling. It’s been
there since the 1980s. Just a couple of blocks past those
old projects, the Curtis Park Creamery still stands. It
doesn’t serve ice cream. Or milk. Or yogurt. The
Creamery got its name back in the 1950s, when the owners
would hand out free soft-serve ice cream to the kids
playing at Curtis Park across the street.

Since 1969,
after new owners took over, the Curtis Park Creamery has
also been cooking up some of the best burritos, tostadas
and menudo in town. In 2019, the Creamery will celebrate
50 years of serving Mexican food in the Five Points
neighborhood. And aside from a fresh coat of paint and a
few minor aesthetic changes, not much about the place has
changed since the early 2000s, when I’d stop in for a
“Number 4, smothered, with extra cheese.”

The takeout
business has stayed in the same family since they took
over in 1969. After founder Lawrence Rodriguez passed away
in 2012, his daughters Loretta Chavez and Deborah Poynter
took over as co-owners along with Deborah’s husband,
Michael Poynter.

Poynter
sounded proud when I spoke to him over the phone about the
staying power of the business. “We’ve endured it
all,” he said. “We’ve endured years of gang violence
and poverty, and now it’s gentrification. But, still,
people keep coming back.”

He’s not
wrong. When I visited, Curtis Park was occupied by people
easily identified as newcomers — a woman playing fetch
with her dog, two joggers and a young man with his hair in
a bun working his bike — but the clientele inside the
Creamery looked much the same as they did 15 years ago.
Poynter says he sees the newer faces in the shop, too.

I ordered a
Number 4, smothered, with extra cheese, and made a remark
to the woman taking my order about how much had changed in
Five Points. Joan Mora, who first began working at the
Creamery when she was 14, just smiled wryly and said,
“For the better.”

I took my
food across the street to enjoy on the grass just like I
used to. I was the only one dining there. There were no
cars with their doors open bumping music, no kids running
around the park playing tag or buying sodas at the corner
store. But the burrito was exactly how I remembered it.

———

THE NEW
DENVER

I know that
everything changes. It’s part of life, but when it means
people of color and low income people are
disproportionately pushed out of their homes, it’s a
different story.

Still,
I’m a travel writer, so I swallowed my nostalgia as best
I could and set out to get a glimpse of this new Denver. I
revisited the area of Five Points now known as the arts
district River North (or RiNo), this time as a tourist on
the Denver Graffiti Tour. The tour met in a parking lot
across from the Denver Rescue Mission in front of a
colorful mural that reads “Love this city.”

Erin
Spradlin, tour guide and co-owner along with her husband,
James Carlson, seemed to understand the significance of
that. Standing in front of the “Love this city” mural,
she began the tour by discussing the area’s spike in
homelessness in 2017, and the gentrification that had
pushed black and Latino communities out of the
neighborhood.

“Not
everyone in this neighborhood is prospering,” she said.
“When we started the tour there was a strong presence of
people suffering from homelessness, so we felt we had to
incorporate that.”

It’s a
bizarre experience to walk with a tour group through the
neighborhood where you grew up, especially when it was
once a place tourists would’ve been told to avoid.

Eighteen
years ago I’d received a C-minus and a stern lecture for
writing an art-class essay about graffiti art in my
neighborhood. “Graffiti isn’t art,” my teacher had
told me. So it was particularly jarring to see a tour
group made up of mostly white tourists showing awe and
respect for this style of art.

Spradlin
touched on that as well. “Art goes from vandalism to
high art, depending on the politics and people
involved,” she said, discussing a piece artist David
Choe had painted a few years before he made millions from
Facebook and was commissioned to create a temporary mural
at Denver International Airport.

Spradlin
also made a distinction between graffiti and street art,
warning that her own tour was actually misnamed. “It’s
more of a street-art tour not a graffiti tour,” she
said. Back when I’d written my C-minus essay, it was all
called “graffiti.”

Toward the
end of the tour, Spradlin gestured to a full wall painting
of Nina Simone and asked if anyone knew who it was. I was
shocked this even qualified as trivia. Spradlin then
pointed out that this was the only piece on the tour by a
black artist and speculated as to why there weren’t more
black street artists.

I bristled
at this, thinking of the “historic cultural” district
signs just a few blocks away, and of old black and Latino
family and friends arrested for graffiti.

The tour
was a beautiful experience, but a complicated one. As one
of the “cultural” people who used to live in the area
but also as a stranger in the whiter, trendier place it
had become, I felt like a ghost watching the world change
around me.

Although
places such as the Creamery have held on, I couldn’t
shake the feeling that every time I took a photo of them,
I was creating a death mask for the Denver I used to know,
and that the next time I visited, I wouldn’t recognize
anything at all.

I took the
long way back to my hotel.

As I walked
along 16th Street downtown, I was shaken out of my funk by
a man in an oversized Afro wig doing impressions of a
robot Michael Jackson. I stopped and gaped at him like a
fangirl.

The man saw
me and made his way over with slow rigid steps, making
machine noises with his mouth. “It’s Beyonce!” he
called out, snapping a finger and mimicking my surprise.

I briefly
became a little girl again as I told him how when I used
to come downtown with my family, I would demand that we
walk down 16th Street Mall so I could see the robot guy.
“That was you!” I said. “15 years ago!”